Additional details about Janette Nesheiwat
A closer look at her claims about medical education and board certification, and the difference between emergency medicine and urgent care
As I examined in an earlier article, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat has repeatedly misrepresented or lied about her medical degree, board certifications, and military experience. Despite a carefully crafted image apparently designed to fulfill what she called her “dream”—becoming surgeon general, the position for which she is currently nominated—her documented record calls into question her qualifications, integrity, and fitness to serve as the nation’s top public health official.
That article, edited for length, left out some details that elaborated on her misrepresentations, the school from which she actually obtained her medical degree, and why how she talks about it matters. It also left out additional details about the differences between emergency medicine (which she claims to practice but does not, and in which she claims to hold board certification and does not), and urgent care (in which she apparently obtained a certification that she does not mention in her social media profiles, personal and professional web sites, media appearances, or profiles attached to her official licenses—and which the public may not verify without her written permission).
Nesheiwat’s claims about her medical education have varied, as have her attempts to give the impression that she graduated with a doctorate in medicine from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
In a Fox News interview on October 13, 2024, above and behind Nesheiwat’s left, there is prominently displayed what looks like a diploma from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Upon close examination, however, one can make out the phrase “Area Health Education Center” and, below it, what seems to be the word “Resident.”
UAMS hosts residency programs in what it formerly called Area Health Education Centers and now calls Regional Campuses.
The framed item appears to be a certificate recognizing her completion of the residency. What it isn’t: a medical degree diploma from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
While she now states on LinkedIn that she earned her M.D. from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (which she did not), she gave a somewhat different account in a December 2018 Facebook post about the value of education and its effect on one’s health. There, she offered a capsule summary of her own education.
She writes that she finished her “medical training and residency at the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences near Little Rock where I served as Chief Resident.” By making a distinction between “medical training” and “residency,” she implies that she not only performed her residency at UAMS but also that she completed separate medical training there; readers may reasonably (but unknowingly inaccurately) conclude that this means her medical degree.
Bolstering this misimpression is what she writes next, about having begun her medical education—which she refers to as “training,” and equates with “studies”—elsewhere: “Initially pursuing training at the American University, I completed the majority of my studies in London, England, at St. Thomas & Guy’s Hospital” [sic].
The American University is an R-1 institution in Washington, D.C. that Congress chartered in 1893.1 It has eight schools and colleges, but no medical school. Despite Nesheiwat’s mentions of “the American University,” this is not the school she attended.
There are several other schools around the world with “the American University” at the beginning of their name, including the American University in Cairo, the American University of Rome, and the American University of Paris.
It was at one of these other schools—the American University of the Caribbean (AUC)—that Nesheiwat studied medicine, and from which she obtained her degree.
While major U.S. universities are usually structured as either private, nonprofit organizations or publicly funded state schools, AUC is neither; it is a commercial business. Operating in Sint Maarten, it was founded in 1978 and has since 2011 been part of Adtalem Global Education (formerly DeVry Education Group), a large corporate provider of for-profit education.
While some news outlets have in the past reported the fact that she obtained her degree from AUC, including last fall in a New York Times profile, Nesheiwat has continued to claim to have earned her medical doctorate from UAMS.
The usual schedule for AUC students at the time Nesheiwat studied there involved “(5) semesters of basic medical sciences taught on St. Maarten and (4.5) semesters of clinical medical sciences taught at affiliated hospitals in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland.” This schedule could be completed in “as little as 38 months if all course work is taken continuously.”
According to the practitioner profile attached to her Florida medical license, Nesheiwat completed her medical degree at AUC in six years—rather than the standard in the U.S. of four years—beginning on August 28, 2000, and graduating on April 1, 2006.
So what about her claim that she only “initially pursued” training at the American University but “completed the majority” of her studies in London at “St. Thomas & Guy’s Hospital”? The way AUC describes it, the majority of a student’s time at the school is spent in the Caribbean.
Nesheiwat may have been referring to completing coursework for her medical degree not on AUC’s campus or at closely affiliated clinical locations, but elsewhere.
And AUC does currently provide a track for students to complete their first two years in the United Kingdom. However, it is located in Lancashire, England, approximately 245 miles from London.
And it is not open to U.S. citizens.
And AUC does not appear to have offered such a program at the time Nesheiwat was a student there.
Another interpretation seems likelier but still raises questions. It is common for medical students to move among several locations during their third and fourth years of medical school—the “clinical rotations” or “clerkship” period, where they learn about and train in different medical specialties—although it is not unheard of for a student to stay at a single, larger hospital and work in different departments.
When Nesheiwat says she “completed the majority” of her medical studies at Guy’s and St. Thomas’, she is likely referring to those clerkships. But Guy’s and St. Thomas’, an organization of five hospitals, was not listed among the ten U.K. clinical hospitals affiliated with AUC at the time Nesheiwat was a medical student. (It is still not.)
Again, just as it is possible for a student to perform all of their clerkships at one hospital, it is also possible for students to perform them in hospitals other than those affiliated with their schools—although doing so would require ensuring that the hospitals meet the school’s criteria, and entail additional administrative work to request and receive permission to do so.
In the United States, students could perhaps accomplish this by asking the school to establish a formal affiliation agreement with the clinical site, in order to create safeguards and ensure standards and oversight. Or they could participate in the American Association of Medical College’s Visiting Student Learning Opportunities program.
It is unclear if options like these existed at AUC when Nesheiwat was a student. Still, perhaps that is what she did. What seems unlikely is that Nesheiwat, as she claimed, “completed the majority of [her] studies in London.” And what is certain is that she did not graduate with a medical doctorate from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
How is AUC different from U.S. medical schools?
Founded, like other for-profit medical schools in the Caribbean, at a time when the United States banned such medical schools, AUC provides a pathway for students who might not otherwise have had the opportunity to obtain a medical degree.
While the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the main body that accredits M.D. programs across the United States and Canada, does not accredit AUC, another international accrediting body, the Accreditation Commission on Colleges of Medicine, accredits nine medical education programs in the Caribbean and Bahrain, including AUC.
This seems to have been the case since 1995, and it was explicitly mentioned on the AUC website by the time Nesheiwat obtained her M.D. from AUC in 2006 (although it was not yet spelled out on the website at the time she matriculated in 2000).
When seeking licensure in the United States, graduates of non-U.S.-accredited medical schools must take additional steps that vary from state to state.
Given the equal playing field that these requirements attempt to offer to graduates of both U.S.-accredited medical schools and international medical graduates, it is not immediately apparent why Nesheiwat has taken such great pains to not only obscure the fact of her having graduated from AUC, but to falsely claim that she earned her M.D. from a completely different school in another country. But not all AUC graduates are as reticent.
AUC’s website spotlights alumni in interviews about their experiences at the school and since. Dr. Sallie Giblin, a 2016 graduate of AUC, said in one such interview, “I initially only applied to in-state MD programs within South Carolina and was waitlisted. . . . It was a huge relief when I got accepted [to AUC], because I realized my hard work had paid off and I was finally getting the opportunity to pursue my dream.”
In a phone interview with me, another recent AUC graduate—a board-certified physician practicing in New England (who was granted anonymity to comment because of the sensitivities of this article)—said, “I’m proud of having graduated from AUC. They took a chance on me.”
Several attempts to contact AUC—its main campus in Sint Maarten, its program site in the U.K., and its administrative office in Miramar, Florida—to inquire about Nesheiwat’s claims of where she completed her medical education, proved fruitless, except for an emailed reply from the AUC registrar’s office stating that it would not verify whether an individual had graduated from AUC unless it had first received permission from the former student to disclose that information.
Here is why the way Nesheiwat usually talks about her residency at UAMS matters: a physician in a residency program associated with a university is generally considered an employee, not a student. Describing oneself as having “studied at” an institution where one completed a medical residency may create the impression that one had been a degree-seeking student at the school. So Nesheiwat saying she “Studied at UAMS” would seem to support her explicit claim on LinkedIn that she received her medical degree from UAMS—which she did not.
Many people take into account where a physician attended medical school in their determinations of where to seek care.
“In my family member’s rural system, the standard and the coordination of care was not high enough to properly diagnose,” wrote Lawrence (not his real name), in an email to me. He is a nonprofit executive in New York City and the primary caregiver for a loved one who had an endocrine disorder that had been challenging to identify. He asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive family medical issue.
“It was only after bringing her to NYC,” he wrote, “that we were able to get her a diagnosis and successful treatment of her condition.”
Lawrence went on to be more specific about his calculations. “If I saw that somebody was a graduate of a for-profit medical college, that would definitely be a cause for concern. That is not a theoretical question for somebody in a rural medical setting. There is a whole system of for-profit schools that let in anybody who can pay.”
Emergency medicine and urgent care
While Nesheiwat completed her residency in family medicine, she does not work as a family doctor. And even though she claims to be an emergency medicine physician, she works in an urgent care clinic.
Emergency medicine differs significantly from urgent care in a number of ways:
Training: emergency physicians complete a 3- to 4-year accredited residency, and the majority are certified in emergency medicine; urgent care providers may be trained in family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, or other fields, or they may not be board-certified in any specialty at all.
Scope of Practice: emergency medicine treats life-threatening, high-acuity cases across all specialties; urgent care addresses lower-acuity, non-emergent complaints.
Availability: emergency departments are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with full hospital support; urgent care centers have limited hours and services.
Resources: emergency departments have immediate access to advanced diagnostics, consultants, surgery, critical care, and other specialty-based inpatient care; urgent care has basic labs and X-rays, and offers some procedures.
Legal Obligation: emergency departments must evaluate and stabilize all patients under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act; urgent care centers are not necessarily bound by EMTALA, and may turn patients away.
Nesheiwat and others have claimed she is an emergency medicine physician; she is not. She and others have claimed that she is board-certified in emergency medicine; she is not.
She does appear to have obtained a certification in urgent care from the American Board of Urgent Care Medicine. But as with the fact of her having graduated from AUC, Nesheiwat does not mention her ABUCM certification on her personal or professional websites, nor on any of her social media accounts, nor, it seems, in any of her numerous interviews or public appearances.
But CityMD, the chain of urgent care clinics where she works as a medical director and physician, is listed as one of the organizations “that accept and/or recognize ABUCM certification and/or have requested verification of the Board Certification in Urgent Care Medicine of our Diplomates.” CityMD’s parent company, VillageMD, is also on that list.
Even Nesheiwat herself made the clear distinction in a November 1, 2021 promotional article for another VillageMD subsidiary, Summit Health.
“An urgent care is a health care facility in which you can walk in without an appointment for medical issues that are not immediately life-threatening,” the page quotes her as saying. She also noted that even if a patient sought treatment at an urgent care center for a life-threatening issue such as an asthma attack or an allergic reaction, staff would still transfer that patient to an emergency room after stabilizing them.
Jenny Wood, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, is the mother of a disabled adult son. She has sought treatment in both emergency rooms and urgent-care locations, depending on the illness or injury.
“My son’s issues tend to be more serious and unusual. So I take him to the ER when I know we will need technology for diagnosis. The urgent care I go to doesn’t have access to much diagnostic machinery: no ultrasound, X-ray, or MRI on-site.”
When asked how she would feel if she or her son were treated at an urgent-care clinic by a physician board-certified in emergency medicine, she replied, “I would be impressed that a smaller facility had a highly qualified doctor on staff. It would be unexpected.”
But asked if she had later learned the physician was not board-certified in emergency medicine, despite having claimed to be, Wood was pointed. “I would be upset about that. There is no good reason to be dishonest about their qualifications. I would be more angry if they made a mistake that affected my or my son’s care.”
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Although students and faculty refer to the school colloquially as “American University,” and most university communications since a mid-1990s rebranding campaign have dropped the definite article, the school’s official name remains “The American University.”